Weeks ahead of its market launch, AMD pulled off a nice PR feat by setting making its trusty squad of overclockers, Sami Mäkinen, Brian Mclachlan, Pete Hardman, and Aaron Schradin set a new clock speed world record (as in Guinness World Record). With just one of its four modules enabled, the eight-core FX-8150 engineering sample was overclocked to a stunning 8429.38 MHz. The chip was able to tolerate a brutal core voltage of 2.016V. Even for a one-in-a-million cherry-picked chip, those are staggering numbers.

8429.38 MHz was achieved using a base clock of 271.92 MHz, with 31.0X multiplier. The memory used was a Corsair Dominator GT single module, which apparently tolerated 3:10 DRAM ratio and timings of 2-16-2-22. That's right, 2-16-2-22. ASUS Crosshair V Formula seated the platform. Cooling was care of a custom liquid-nitrogen evaporator setup. The team used liquid nitrogen as its cooling medium, and switched to liquid helium halfway, which has a lower boiling point. The team cherry-picked chips from the best lots on-site.

A video of the feat follows.

This feat was more of a hit-and-run, in which the system could run at the desired frequency stable enough to make a CPU-Z validation, no proper stability testing was done. AMD claims that frequencies over 5.00 GHz were possible using sub-$100 cooling solutions (now that can be anything between a high-end heatsink and a cheap closed-loop liquid cooler). AMD did a similar overclocking feat ahead of its Phenom II processor launch.

Or will you? (considering we're still waiting for RL performance figures)

Click to expand...

Given that, if it were available in stores, hence anybody could buy it, I could expect benchmarks shortly after.
I would be happy, yes. Not because this might be my future processor choice, but because I could stop waiting and buy something and not feel bad about it 3 days later.

Thats how they do it Sihastru (CPUz clockspeed records)...you disable cores to achieve the highest clockspeed. Its obviously not for 24/7 clocks considering that as well as the cooling method. Put it in a bit of perspective men.

Really could care less....Whats stupid is we've seen benchmarks from the LGA 2011 lineup before we've seen Bulldozer's performance level. All signs indicate that this is intentionally done because of lack luster performance.

TLDR; Doesn't matter if it does 5Ghz on air, if it gets beat by a stock i7 2600k it's pointless.

Er, how is revving your 50cc motorbike/vespa to breaking point anything of interest. Seriously, if they had all 8 cores blowing and stable with world record benchmark numbers, then that would be worth noting. This isnt. Q. Can it run minesweeper? A. No.

Message to these boys: Listen. If you want to be a geeky nerd, fine. But do something to impress us. Don't have a camera focused on yourself like you are doing something that will put us in awe. When it didn't. Fail. Even bigger fail to AMD that thinks this is worthy. Corporate Fail. (And that's even worse!)